MOTOWN JUNK/P.C.P./LA TRISTESSE DURERA/AUSTRALIA:

The Manic Street Preachers were, much like The Jam before them, a band tagged early on as 'political.' In neither case did the label fit well: The Manics' politics opposed not so much specific political agendas as politics itself. Also like The Jam, they fused punk with other genres: for The Jam, it was punk + jazz; for The Manics, punk + metal. "Motown Junk" is a fairly standard punk song structure, punctuated by heavy guitar solos. Oh yes, and:

Motown junk a lifetime of slavery
Songs of love echo underclass betrayals
Stops your heart beating for 1-6-8 seconds
Stops your brain thinking for 1-6-8 seconds

Their early work, though inspired, was uneven. Generation Terrorists had three memorable songs; Gold Against the Soul was more good than bad. By the time of The Holy Bible, the Manics perfected a bracing, vitriolic sound to match, well, depressing subject matter: Communist oppression, crime waves, racial indifference, the Holocaust, and, in one memorable song ("4st. 7lbs."), Richey James' bulimia. The album caps off with "P.C.P.", which catalogues endless frustrations ("lawyers before love," "beware Shakespeare," "pro-life equals anti-choice") with P.C. language, the best of which is: "P.C./she speaks impotent and sterile/naive, blind, atheist, sadist/ stiff upper lip first principle of her silence."

It took me a long time to figure out "La Tristesse Durera", which did not entirely click for me until I took a class on British history 1901-1945. The song is written from the perspective of a World War I veteran, angry at the indifference with which his suffering has been and is met ("I see Liberals/ I am just a fashion accessory," "I sold a medal/ It paid a bill/ It sells on market stalls/ parades Milan catwalks"). The anger, everywhere in their music, finally meets a subject worthy of that anger.

The real turn is with Everything Must Go, which I have blogged about several times before, and is one of my favorite albums of all time. This is the Rolling Stone review that made me go out and buy the album:

A triumph of dignity and style over potentially crippling adversity, Everything Must Go is the most underrated album of the year – in this country, anyway, where the Manics have been running into a brick wall of indifference since 1992's Generation Terrorists. The band's songwriting and stacked-vocal-and-guitar splendor have grown by leaps and bounds from shotgun-pop pugnacity into something a lot more interesting – Abbey Road with tenement-block attitude; Give 'Em Enough Rope as produced by Phil Spector. But in February 1995, the Manics were blindsided by the disappearance of guitarist and lyricist Richey James, a case still unsolved by the British police. On Everything Must Go, singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, bassist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore confront their nightmare head-on – the baffling loss, the frustrating lack of answers – and battle their way to daylight. A gnawing sense of dark stasis hovers over the record: The rainbow glow of the orchestral score in "A Design for Life" is tinged with irritable despair in Bradfield's soaring, caustic voice. Yet for all of the images of crisis and escape in these songs, Everything Must Go is a record of painstaking melodic craft and thundering execution, a proclamation of physical and emotional cleansing – up to a point. In the CD booklet, the Manics have included a quote from the artist Jackson Pollock: "The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and an attempt to point out the direction of the future – without arriving there completely." In other words, they're still waiting for James.

There's nothing I can really add to that. "Australia:"

LENTEN REFLECTION OF THE DAY: from Erasmus, "Concerning the Eating of Fish":

A man who is sick is more apt to remember St. Roach or Dionysius than Christ, the only health of mankind. Further, those who from the pulpit interpret the Holy Scriptures, which cannot be done without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, choose rather to invoke the aid of the Virgin Mary than of Christ or his Spirit. Anyone who mutters against this custom, which they call laudable, is suspected of being a heretic. The custom of the ancient Father was much more laudable. Such authorities as Origen, Basil, Chrysostom, Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine invoked the Spirit of Christ but never implored the aid of the Virgin. But there is no hew and cry against those who have presumed to alter so holy a custom, taken from the doctrine of Christ, the Apostles, and the examples of the Holy Fathers

LINK: This is a really excellent article on Johnny Cash, with music samples, that treats (fairly) both his Christian side and his unfortunate tendency to sing material far below his talents.

QUOTE: Jerry Fodor on Richard Dawkins, one in an ongoing series hosted by the LRB:

Dawkins likes to ‘insist … that wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.’ He’s right, I think, but this is another of those two-edged swords. The conclusion might be that adaptation really is most or all of what there is to evolution; or it might be that we don’t actually know a lot about the etiology of what appears to be biological good design. Dawkins is inclined to bet on the first horse, but it’s not hard to find quite reputable scientists who are inclined to bet on the second. Either way, it’s a shame not to tell the reader that what’s going on is, in fact, a horse race and not a triumphal procession.

Fodor is an interesting figure to read on this topic, since he is very interested in separating plausible explanations from true ones: that an explanation may be an complete explanation is good, but that really tells us nothing about whether it's accurate. In the face of that, a little humility is interesting. I like the horse race/triumphal procession contrast, and will have to make use of it at some point.

LENTEN REFLECTION OF THE DAY: From Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity:

But we shall not spend any more time on this; we prefer to advance another observation: Is truth such that in relation to it one may suppose that a person can appropriate it summarily with the help of another? Summarily, that is, without willing oneself to be developed in like manner, to be tried, to battle, to suffer as did the one who acquired the truth for him? Is it not just as impossible as to sleep or dream oneself into the truth; is it not just as impossible summarily to appropriate it, however wide awake one is? Or is one is wide awake, is it not merely an illusion if one does not understand or refuses to understand that in relation to truth there is no abridgment that leaves out the acquiring of it, and that in relation to acquiring it from generation to generation there is no essential abridgment, so that every generation and everyone in the generation must essentially begin from the beginning?

LINK: Last week I had a discussion about an article in the most recent Atlantic on breastfeeding. Hugo Schwyzer links to, and discusses, the article here.

LINK: I completely approve of this sort of thing:

Beverage makers admit they aren’t paying the new taxes. They say they don’t have to because they have reformulated the drinks — more than 6,000 varieties — to transform them into simple beers by limiting the amount of distilled spirits they contain. They won’t explain how. The formulas, they say, are trade secrets. And beverage-industry officials and federal regulators say there are no tests to determine how much distilled spirits the drinks contain.

LINK: Rod Dreher is so spot-on in his entirely fair, not-at-all tendentious criticisms of evangelical culture. To wit:

I think I know what the poster means by "Christian hipster" in one sense, though. I keep running into youngish Christians who go to churches with names that don't sound like churches, but rather experiences (e.g., "The Journey").

Yeah, I mean, what will these kids come up with next? They'll probably start calling Christianity "The Way" or something crazy like that...

THIS IS NEW: I did not receive 8 out of 30 papers by the time they were due. Obviously the late penalty wasn't harsh enough.

LINK: Alex Massie hits on the peculiarities of Obama's foreign policy, a topic I am noting well this semester since I am TAing American Foreign Policy. A taste:

Foreign correspondents in Washington know there's little they can hope to get from a candidate running for the Presidency. At best they'll be tolerated, at worst abused and patronised. Obama is not on the campaign trail any longer but his press strategy does not seem to have switched to governing mode yet.

Indeed, for a President who wants to "renew" America's relationship with the rest of the world, Obama is strikingly reluctant to actually, you know, speak to the rest of the world. When he embarked on his tour of europe last summer he failed to take a single foreign journalist with him; nor did he grant any interviews while he was in Britain, not even to the BBC. That pattern has largely continued now thta he's in office.

No doubt there is time for all this to be straightened out, but one has to notice how catch-as-catch-can foreign policy is these days. Bush was, of course, bad at this, too, but at least one had the sense that he had a plan, even if that plan was too simplistic or wrong. Consider today's revelation about the secret letter to Russia. When, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians want to put U.S. missiles in Turkey up for negotiation, Kennedy rejects it outright (while secretly signalling, not quite promising, that the missiles will be removed a discreet time after Russia removes them from Cuba)--but the secret part of the negotiation moves the whole process forward. Obama's move appears to be an offer unsolicited by Russia, which makes me wonder exactly what is supposedly going on.

A NOTE TO OTHERS: The average number of friends is about 150. The linked article contains an interesting breakdown of how this works out in circles: ten innermost, another 35, then the rest. I suspect that's about right, though figuring it out will be a task for some office hours where I am very, very bored, and lacking any other work to do.

FACT OF THE DAY: Before today, I had not had a snow day in nine years, including all of undergrad and grad thusfar. I believe the last time I had a snow day was senior year of high school. I went to school for meetings with students anyway.